Yo yo yo

[thejeff]

Hey there. I'm Jeff, and I'm from MA. I am looking into digital cartography primarily to provide a setting for a D&D campaign I am running.

I have a few questions. First of all, I am curious what people consider the best programs for mapping.
Secondly, I am wondering if there is a program which allows you to create linked maps. Where, if you had a world map, you could click on a particular nation, which would link to the nation's map, where you could click on a city, to see the city's map, and click on a castle to see the floor plan, etc. If you had designed maps for all these places, is there a program that would allow you to weave them together like that?


So... Hello!

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!

Well, to answer your first question, prefer CC3, other Fractal Mapper, other Photoshp, other GIMP, etc.

As to linked maps, CC3 does indeed support linked maps.

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[mearrin69]

Welcome. My software of choice is Photoshop...but it won't do what you want. Once you've got completed maps you could certainly rig up something with a Web technology (HTML and image maps or Flash if you want to get that technical) or programming language. I don't know much about it but there's an app developed by a forum member called ViewingDale that will do exactly what you want (hopefully I've got that right).
M

[tilt]

welcome to the guild. I work with photoshop and illustrator, but as said above everybody got their own preferences. And in response to mearrins post I just want to clarify that "ViewingDale" is the softwares name, the user is Redrobes

[mearrin69]

LOL. I made a common grammatical mistake there didn't I. I did know that the *software* is named ViewingDale, not the forum member...but my hinky wording suggests otherwise.
M

[jfrazierjr]

Fractal Mapper will likewise allow you to create linkable maps. One note, while I don't have Viewingdale from what I understand of it you you would not have linked maps but as you zoom in the larger scale image is replaced by the smaller scale image. It appears to do that using existing images, so I have no idea how much ability it has to "create" maps.

One not about Fractal Mapper and Campaign Cartographer is that while they do have the ability to create linkable maps easily, there are certain style considerations you will have to make for both of these, so take that into account. Photoshop, GIMP, or any digital image program will provide the ability to create a far nicer map image if you have some artistic talent and are willing to commit the time to learn and practice while Fractal Mapper and Campaign Cartographer are mostly used to place prebuilt objects(created by the software publishers in most cases) which make building a map very quick(but again, you are a bit more limited stylistically)

Also I know at least Fractal Mapper has a free trial edition (with save disabled IIRC).